My laptop died on Dec 1, 2009. I was on vacation, but on Dec 2 I called Toshiba (I have a Qosmio F40) and arranged for a repair under the extended warranty I had purchased. I shipped it back on Dec 2, it was received on Dec 4, and since then I’ve had it for about 12 hours total until last Friday. It came back once and blue screened constantly, whether from the existing OS, a reload of Vista, or a reload of Win 7. It went back the next day, and was with Toshiba until I got a notice last Tuesday that UPS had tried to deliver it.

Since I was out of town on vacation (thanks for the lack of notice that it was shipped, Toshiba), I couldn’t arrange for a pickup. Then on Wed for some reason the UPS driver didn’t come, and I missed him Thur as well, leaving the house at 6:40pm. He came at 7. I know my local UPS driver, and he was off Wed, and the sub didn’t bother to leave a note on the gate or a notice. I did get a call Thur night around 7:15, but I was in karate and missed it. I called my driver on Fri, and though it was his off day, he arranged for the sub driver to meet my at 11am at the local gas station. Great customer service and it saved me from waiting until 6 or 7 Fri night.

I got the laptop, fired it up, and while it booted and appeared to work, my drive had been wiped, and it wanted to re-set Vista. No big deal as I’ve saved my data before I shipped it off and was planning on putting Win 7 on it, so I broke out the disks and spent a lot of Friday night reinstalling stuff and patching Windows. Around 8 I stopped to call it a night and I was about done except for SQL Server and Office.

I woke up Saturday morning and my laptop had gone into hibernate mode. So I pressed the power button to get it to wake up. It lit up, the drive accessed, I saw the abbreviated BIOS startup that shows it coming out of hibernate, and then I got a blank screen. Well, not completely blank, I had a blinking cursor in the upper left, like my Apple II used to do in 1983.

I watched it for about 10 minutes and decided nothing was happening, so I then pressed the power button. I had intended to hold it in and force a cold boot, but everything turned off right away, like it does when it goes into hibernate.

After that I tried:

• holding the power button to force a cold boot
• powering it on and then holding the power button while the BIOS screen was on.
• taking the battery out and just using AC power.
• letting the blinking cursor run down the battery

Nothing would cold boot the machine. That’s strange in and of itself since I’ve had hibernate fail more than a few times and force me to reboot. After an hour of trying everything I could think of, I called Toshiba. The tech support guy had me try a bunch of the same things and nothing worked.

I was stunned. Toshiba had no way of forcing a cold boot. They offered to have me ship it back, which I could have done, but I have been without a laptop for 39 days at this point and complained to the guy. He couldn’t do anything, but said I should call back on Monday and ask for a replacement machine.

So I was stuck, and decided to do some laptop shopping. I posted a few notes on Twitter and Facebook and a few of the technical people I know recommended Lenovo as solid machines. Then a few more said to try Dell, and I even got an HP recommendation. It seems that there’s a good split, though Lenovo has a slight lead.

I looked around, but the problem with all these places is that the earliest ship date for a machine I want, even without changing the configurations they list, was 1/20/10. Lenovo was even further, out at 1/24/10. That might not be a huge problem as I’m on vacation that week, but if I’m going to wait two weeks, then maybe I should hit up Toshiba again.

I’ve had issues rebooting this machine for the two years I’ve owned it. Otherwise it’s been a good machine, so if I can get it replaced, I’m willing to stick with it for now. Then I’ll look for a replacement later in 2010. My warranty expires next fall anyway, and I was planning on a new one then. I’d like to move to a quad core as my desktop quad is pretty nice when rendering video.

I had been looking at a PDC Acer, which was given out to PDC attendees in Nov. I was ready to buy, but the seller disappeared on me. At least until Sunday night. She finally apologized and said work had been crazy and she’d forgotten. It was a good deal, $500 for a tablet that has a dual core, and it will give me a spare that I can use while I sort out my primary situation.

This has been a long, annoying customer service and repair problem with the laptop, however as I look over CS reviews of all the major manufacturers, I find numerous issues with all of them. I think that most of these machines are built in a similar manner, and it’s such a quantity/scale issue that any manufacturer could face an issue with any particular machine. If you get caught with that machine, then you’re the guy that suffers.

I primarily use a laptop when I travel, for managing the site, writing, email, etc. I sometimes do video on it, though I’m not sure the Acer tablet can handle that. I work in bed a lot, writing up there when it’s quiet in the afternoon or at night, and lacking a machine has been a big problem for me this last month. It’s made it hard to write.

I have the netbook, but it’s too small to comfortably use in my lap, and it’s slow. If I got to Starbucks or BN, then it works fine as a writing machine, but I can’t really work on it.

The Acer should be here Tuesday, and that will relieve some pressure. After that I’ll either get a Toshiba replacement or I’ll be looking to purchase a new one. I don’t often work without power, so battery life isn’t as big a deal as high performance. I’m tempted to go for a quad core and 8GB of RAM, though I don’t want anything larger than a 15.6” machine. Not a lot of choices there.

Recommendations on specific models welcome.